Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital

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Summary: A Review by someone who has worked at McLean for 20 years.
Review: This book is an engaging account of what still is America's Premier Mental Hospital. I have worked at this hospital as a counselor, and have worked with patients in a direct-care capacity.During my tenure at the Hospital, I have run poetry groups for patients. So-I found the chapter about McLean Poets (Sexton, Plath and Lowell) of particular interest. Beam interviewed me for an article for Double Take magazine concerning poetry at Mclean, and I was acknowledged in the book. My impression of Mr. Beam was of someone who was truly engaged in his subject, and felt in spite of the warts, the institution is essential and valuable.

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Summary: Fails to paint a picture of McLean, Insanity, or Psychiatry
Review: This book promises to depict the way in which caring of the mentally ill has changed over the last 150 years. I wish the author had kept his promise. Back when McLean was called the Boston Lunatic Asylum, life was a little different for the average schizophrenic patient. And the idea of tracing the development of psychiatry by way of a history of McLean is a great idea. Unfortunately, what we get instead is hodge-podge of Boston Brahmin gossip, architectural history, psychiatric theory, and mundane factoids. I was expecting anecdote, but I wanted revealing anecdote. For instance, Beam writes about all the McLean patients who had received lobotomies. But he never delves into how lobotomized patients acted or how they might have felt about the procedure. I would love to have known why old-time psychiatrists thought hydrotherapy was useful for depressed patients. Beam mentions hydrotherapy, but really doesn't do any more than skim the surface. I guess I wish the author had been someone with some background in mental health. As an aside, I thought it was interesting that the subtitle of the paperback ("Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital") is different from that of the hardcover version ("The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital"). I remember when the book first came out that McLean administrators were unhappy with the hardcover title since it suggested that McLean was on the decline. Why would Beam have changed the name? I tend to think that the reasons had to do with selling more copies of his book rather than with any change of opinion on his part. If that is the case, then Beam is more than just a superficial writer, he is also a sell-out.